Dinaw Mengestu Quotations

Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.

I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.

I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.

As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.

As an undergraduate, I took a theology course titled Religion as Writing. If writing can be considered a form of faith, then inevitably doubt has to accompany it.

'The Duino Elegies' are notoriously cryptic, and part of the reason why I have always loved them is because they invite multiple readings over the course of a lifetime.

In high school, I began to dig my way into Ethiopian history, and began to understand myself as a young man formed by multiple narratives.

I wrote my first book without being to Ethiopia since I was two years old.

I couldn't be more American if I tried. I was born in Ethiopia, but I was raised and educated as an American.

Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It's inevitable how that happens, but it's generic. Say I've written a story where my sister dies. 'Well, did your sister die?' No, she did not. But people use those straws to grasp at the difference between reality and fiction.